What Happened to The Wizard Liz’s Family After They Became Refugees?

This article draws on our conversation with Liza Jubrailova.

The family’s refugee poverty did not happen by accident; Liza Jubrailova says money was kept out of her mother’s hands even when help had already arrived.

She describes a home where war, disability, and displacement had already stripped the family down to the basics, then control inside the household made daily life even tighter. If you want the short answer to what happened after they became refugees, it is this: they stayed poor, and her mother carried the weight of that poverty while having almost no power over it.

Why did The Wizard Liz’s family stay poor after becoming refugees?

The Wizard Liz family story, as Liza Jubrailova tells it, stayed marked by poverty because the money that came in did not go toward the children’s food, clothes, or stability.

She says her oldest brother was disabled because of the war, and the family received around 10,000 to 15,000 dollars in government support for refugees because he needed medical support and other care (22:30). She is clear about one point: this was a one-time payment, not some steady monthly benefit that kept the household afloat.

According to Jubrailova, her father took that support money and sent it back home so his own mother could build a house after the war destroyed hers. By then, she says, he already had 3 children of his own and his immediate family could barely afford food or other basics (23:08).

“I genuinely hate this person.”

— Liza Jubrailova (23:08)

She says that line while speaking about the damage done inside the family, and the reason is plain in the details she gives. In her account, the issue was never only that the family lacked money. The issue was that the one significant sum they received was redirected away from the people living in that household, including a disabled child and two younger daughters.

That turns refugee hardship into something harder to escape. War had already taken a lot. Inside the home, control over money made the damage last longer.

How was her mother kept dependent?

Her mother was kept dependent because, in Jubrailova’s telling, she could not freely use money, work when she wanted, or make ordinary choices for the children.

She says her mother had to beg her father for 5 dollars just to buy bread (24:35). She also says he would not allow her to work at first, and he would not let her access the refugee support money either. That detail matters because it shifts the picture from simple shortage to enforced dependence: money existed, but not for the person trying to feed the children.

When her mother asked for a job, she says he called his friends to laugh at her instead of helping her find one.

“Look at this dumb ass. She wants a job.”

— Liza Jubrailova (24:49)

Jubrailova uses that moment to show humiliation as part of the control. In her telling, the point was not just to stop her mother from earning. It was to make the request itself sound ridiculous, so asking again would feel harder.

She also says her mother was allowed to see her son in Canada for only a week (22:04), another example of how decisions around money, movement, and family contact sat in someone else’s hands. Read together, those details explain why she later speaks about money in such loaded terms. For her, income is tied to the right to move, feed your children, and act without begging.

What sacrifices did her mother make to give the children a normal life?

Her mother kept trying to create small pieces of childhood for the children even when the family had almost nothing and she had to earn under punishing conditions.

Jubrailova gives one of the clearest examples through school carnival costumes. She says her mother sold her gold jewelry so she and her sister could take part, with Liz dressed as a butterfly and her sister as a frog. It is a tiny image, but it says a lot. Gold jewelry can be one of the last things a woman holds onto in a precarious life, and in her account it was traded for a day when the girls would not feel left out.

She also says her mother eventually got 1 job in a factory packing boxes, heavy work that Jubrailova describes as the kind of labor most men do (35:09). Before that legal opening even arrived, she says she herself was 15 turning 16 when it became legal for her to work (20:14), which places the family’s struggle against a clock: everybody was waiting for the next person old enough or allowed enough to bring in something.

Her mother also cleaned toilets for 10 dollars a week, as described in the episode materials. That is not presented as a side note. It sits at the center of how the household survived: humiliating work, physically hard work, and badly paid work, all taken on after being mocked for wanting employment in the first place.

Why does The Wizard Liz connect money with safety and dignity?

The Wizard Liz family experience led Jubrailova to treat money as safety and dignity because she saw what happened when the person doing the caregiving had no financial power.

Her account of refugee poverty is not built around abstract ideas about success. It is built around bread, school clothes, a mother asking for permission, and a daughter watching her mother do work that kept everybody alive while receiving almost none of the respect that should have come with it.

That is why she frames money later as something bigger than spending power. In her telling, money means not having to ask someone cruel for 5 dollars. It means having an exit when the home itself becomes a place of deprivation. It means being able to help the parent who kept sacrificing, whether that was by selling jewelry for carnival costumes or by packing boxes and cleaning toilets to keep the family going.

Jubrailova’s version of financial security starts there: not luxury, not status, but the power to stop helplessness from running the house.

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